Part II

Date: 2015-10-07; view: 333.

Harry Potter

Idioms

Vocabulary extension

Unit 7. LIFE CHANGES

Writing

Optional Tasks

III. Dwell on the following.

1. Catie's life as a cancer patient.

2. Catie and Jo Rowling's relationship through mailing.

3. “Hang on to hope or surrender to fear” slogan.

4. The hype around a new instalment.

5. Harry Potter as a contentious issue in terms of national character culture.

6. A secular culture war in terms of Harry Potter's acclaim.

7. Adults' obsession with Harry Potter books.

8. Uniqueness of Harry Potter books.

1. Dwell on Jungian archetypes.

2. “The Grapes of Wrath” by John Steinbeck.

1. Write an outline of the text “Harry Potter” (Part 1).

2. Write a gist of the text “Harry Potter” (Part 1).

to display / show patience

to lose one's patience

to run out of patience

to tax / try smb.'s patience

endless / inexhaustible / infinite patience

one's patience wears thin

She has endless patience with the children.

Do you have the patience to do this job?

angelic patience

enough to try the patience of a saint

like patience on a monument

patience is a plaster for all sores

Kids say that in her portrayal of the friendship between Harry, Ron and Hermione, Rowling shows an uncanny under­standing of how adolescents deal with one another. "She gets almost everything right," says Ligia Mizhquiri, 12, from, Chicago. "What happens [at Harry's school] hap­pens to us. Some of us are popular. Some of us are not. Some of us get bullied. Some of us are bullies." Harry's friendship with Ron evokes every buddy movie ever made; the pattern is so familiar to kids that when word got out that a character would die in Book 4, children wrote to Rowling and begged not to kill Ron off, because in the movies it's always the sweet best friend who dies. But into that familiar tree house Rowling inserts Hermione, infuriating at first, indispensable very soon, and the tone and tenor of their friendships ring true to a generation of kids for whom gender roles and relationships have been rearranged.

Hermione would be a pretty familiar stereotype as well if she were just "the smart one." But Rowling also makes her resourceful and at times the toughest. "Hermione ignores a lot," says Ellis O'Connor, 10, in Evanston, Ill. "Ignoring while people are teasing is very, very im­portant, because if you don't ignore them, they'll get on your nerves more, and it will be worse." She knows something about being teased because of a developmentally delayed older brother whom the other kids call retarded. Kids who get mocked because they don't have cool clothes find a soul mate in Ron. "If you took all three and put them into a blender, you'd get me," says Ryan Gepperth, 12, of Chicago. "I like to try new things, like Harry. I love reading, like Hermione. And I have prob­lems of my own like Ron," says Ryan, a husky boy tousled brown hair. “Ron gets made fun of a lot because he has a lot of brothers and sisters and he comes from a poor family. The other kids don't like him because of that."

Rowling creates a bridge for kids to cross from her magical world to their own, built out of rules and constraints that both share. The very existence of Hogwarts School, the training academy for young wizards, is a testament to the reality that learning still takes time and patience. There's no spell that fills one's head with knowledge; the best Hermione can man­age in Book 3 is the Time Turner, to give her more hours to study. The Weasleys, Ron's family, are still poor—and any world in which a family as hardwork­ing, loving and generous as theirs still struggles to put food on the table is, well, a lot like our own. Mrs. Wessley can cast a spell to make dirty dishes clean themselves, but she can't create new kitchenware out of thin air. Rowling has created a world in which a boy can fly on a broom, talk to snakes and grow gills like a fish, but he can no more easily cope with his crushing sadness about his dead parents than any other child. "She mixes the real-life struggles in with the imaginary, magic struggles," says Casey Brewer, 15, of Longwood, Fla. "Harry and his friends have to think through the obstacles in life the
same as they have to think through an obstacle that's a three-headed dog. It's, like, inspirational.”

Inspirational, but mercifully not perfect. Wizards have troubles and egos and envy and ratty robes they are embarrassed to wear. Harry is capable of jealousy and insensitivity. He breaks rules and doesn't tell grownups things it would plainly be in his interest to reveal. He gets into trouble. ("If he didn't you wouldn't have all those pages to read," notes Zack Ferleger, 12, of Encino, Calif.) Hermione may be smart, but she can be rigid; Hagrid is loving, but, to a fault when it comes to horribly scary beasts. Ron is loyal but insecure. Rowling loves her characters and invites readers to love them, not just despite their flaws but because of them. Since one's flaws loom large in ado­lescence, that is quite a healing potion.

So given the lessons these books teach and the values they honor, how is it that they remain controversial? Even among evangelical and Fundamentalist Christian parents, there is a deep divide over how much to embrace the popular culture and use it for missionary purposes. On the one hand there are those who share the view of Jack Brock, castor of the Christ Community Church in Alamogordo, N.M., which made worldwide headlines for its "holy bonfire" in December 2001, in which Harry Potter was among the books burned. The incident was taken out of context, says Brock. “The media made me look like Hitler.” But that said, he still would do it again. They [the books] are totally, com­pletely, entirely about witchcraft,” he told Time. "The next book, I understand, will be 700 pages long, and it's just going to be going deeper and deeper into witchcraft. Anyone who thinks that's healthy, I don't understand. God says in Deuteronomy that witchcraft is an abomination. Whatever God hates, I hate.”

But those who disagree do more than defend the books as just good clean fun. They praise them as powerful moral tools. The Catholic News Service, run by the American bishops, puts the books on its recommended list for children. Ministers preach sermons likening Harry's running through the wall of Platform 9 3/4 to a leap of faith. "We're missing something if we can't tell stories from the Bible as compelling as Harry Potter”, says John Fleming, minister of First United Methodist in Henrietta, Texas. Many have found embedded in the books all kinds of biblical imagery. "If you read these books carefully, they are not only not evil, they are profound sto­ries about good, and they are deeply religious,” argues Baylor University philosophy professor Scott Moore, who started by reading the books to his kids and ended up staying up late to finish for himself.

The climax of the second book, Chamber of Secrets, he asserts, works as pure Christian allegory. “It's the story of Harrу fighting a serpent and overcoming it with the sword of Gryffindor. Hе is unable to accom­plish this by himself and must call for help, which comes from above, most often in the form of the word of truth or a double-edged sword. It's not just a snake he has to overcome but a snake summoned by [the evil wizard] Voldemort's memory. Over and over in these medieval mystery morality plays, it's the memory of our sinful­ness that we must overcome. The phoenix[2]— a classic symbol of Christ, who dies and rises again—comes to help him. He kills the serpent, then in a moment quite shocking— I'm surprised Hollywood left it in—the phoenix weeps in his wound to heal him. That's a classic symbol of Christ's passion. It's Christ's tears that make us whole."

When the moment comes that parents must trust their children's hearts to anoth­er, they pray that whoever fills that space— a teacher, a coach, a character in a book—will be worthy of the power and will use it well. A month after Catie Hoch's ninth birthday, doctors found that the can­cer had spread to her brain and that she had only a few weeks left. That was when the phone rang.

Over the next few days, Rowling read aloud to Catie from Book 4, which was fi­nally finished but would not be released until summer. "She was lying on the couch," Gina says, remembering how her daughter was transport­ed, "just listening and listening." The family re­sisted putting the call on the speaker phone. “That was Catie's time with Jo," Gina says. “We didn't want to intrude on their privacy." The last few times Rowling called, Catie was too sick to come to the phone. She drifted into a coma and died on May 18, 2000.

Rowling wrote to her parents three days later. "I consider myself privi­leged to have had contact with Catie," she wrote. "I can only aspire to being the sort of parent both of you have been to Catie during her illness. I am crying so hard as I type. She left footprints on my heart all right." Caries parents established the Catie Hoch Foundation to help young cancer pa­tients. In November a check for $100,000 appeared, from Catie's favourite English friend.